Yes, it was called Saved! and it was quite good. It had a better ending than the one that girl’s headed toward, though. That movie was like a documentary about my (Baptist) high school, I swear.
It’s called “Saved” and I highly recommend this movie.
Y’all may continue.
Damn! See what happens when you don’t read the entire thread? I was so happy too that I was able to answer a question. Time stopped. “This moment is mine,” I says to myself.
Click on the reply button.
Type out my response.
Click submit reply.
My life is good. My day is complete. I am now whole.
But no! Alas! Hark! And other words one might exclaim in a moment of shock and amazement. Yes I was both shocked and amazed. It wasn’t meant to be. My moment has not yet come, so I sit here waiting, hoping my wait will not be too long.
My mother still believes this. She also believes that chocolate causes zits. I’ve all but given up trying to convince her otherwise. She and my sister both believe in Silvia Brown’s nonsense.
A friend’s mother believed that deodorant caused cancer and refused to use it, nor did she encourage her daughters too. My friend’s sisters did start using it eventually -one after the school nurse tactfully suggested it to her. Nor did she or her husband believe it was dangerous to take a shower during a storm.
(watch, someone will tell me that they were right!)
I’m reminded of Adelle Davis. My mom was a fanatical follower of anything and everything she said. If Adelle Davis said, “go lick bird poop off the sidewalk” mom would have us out there doing it. Much of my diet growing up was Adelle-Davis-Approved-Only.
As the cites in this post clearly state both the Lena and McKenzie rivers have extensive deltas.
In his essay on the worlds great rivers Isaac Asimov divides the world’s rivers into two categories; 1) The Amazon and 2) all the others.
The Amazon dilutes the sea water for over 100 miles out.
Reading this thread makes me sad and frustrated. Nevertheless, I have a story of my own.
When faxes were a relatively new phenomenon. I guy I knew seemed surprised when the paper we were faxing came out the other end, and assumed the fax didn’t work right.
He thought that the fax machine was a paper teleportation device.
This is from the OP and I simply must contest it. How do you know planes don’t fly because we believe they can?
Of course, you’re going to tell me they fly because of Bernoulli’s principle. But you believe in Bernoulli’s principle don’t you?
I rest my case.
I’ve never seen it, although I remember wanting to when it came out. You’re absolutely right that my friend is not going down a good path for herself. I’ve tried giving her some tough love about it, but she sticks to her guns. I owe her no more, because we’re not that good of friends (we’ve studied together and that’s pretty much it). If I were religious, I’d pray for her, though.
Fish don’t perform electrolysis of water molecules, they use dissolved oxygen. The question is, given a stagnant and nonfiltered fishbowl, which would happen first: the oxygen gets used up, or the fish’s waste products build up to toxic levels?
With turtles, it’s the latter. I once had a high school bio project which involved keeping small animals in water habitats. One group kept turtles, and had a rotating schedule for which group member cleaned the tank each week. One particular girl’s turn came up and she never did it. After a few days the turtles were being poisoned by their own fecal water, and their shells were cracking open and getting infected. It was probably the most horrific state I’ve ever personally seen a living creature in.
I suspect you’re joking, (and I think most people will actually argue angle of attack is more significant than Bernoulli’s principle), but even so, these are things that operate whether or not anyone believes them - that’s the whole point of physical science.
And yes, of course I believe that, but it doesn’t matter what I believe.
People still belive this. I work in a medical facility. One of my duties is to take care of all outgoing and incoming faxes. You wouldn’t beleive how many people hand me a fax and say “Please make me a copy of that to keep before you fax it. I get some rather perplexed looks when I try to explain to them they don’t need a copy, they will get that actual piece of paper back!”
Another woman who didn’t know how to use the fax asked me to show her how. So I go through the process with her. When her confirmation reciept printed out she saw the little “OK” in the status line. She wanted to know if that was the reply from the doctor we had just sent the fax to. :smack:
Okay, I think it’s all hokum too. But a friend of mine demonstrated it for me, and then had me do it. He had wire coathangers straightened out, then bent them about 4 inches from the end to serve as handles.
He walked across the yard, and the wires crossed when he walked over the waterline. I thought he was doing it on purpose. Then he had me do it. I held on to them loose enough for them to move, but I in no way attempted to control their movement in any other way. The fucking wires crossed.
I went further down the yard. Water line’s still in the same place, but in a different area of the yard. The wires crossed again. I did this at least 5 times. I can honestly say I kept my hands as stiff as possible. The wires crossed on their own accord as if they were attracted to a magnet.
I haven’t tried it again since then, so I can’t say it works everywhere and everytime, but it sure as hell worked then, despite all logic.
It would be interesting to try this in someone else’s yard, where you don’t know in advance where the water line is, but someone else does (for verification).
At my one and only office job, I kept having to show an older woman how to use the fax machine. She, too, was often confused on why she got her original paper back, and would fax it again and again, assuming it didn’t “go through right.”
I wish I’d thought of the phrase ‘paper teleportation device’ back then. 
More bad medical science from my in-laws:
My MIL sincerely believed that going out in cold weather with damp hair guaranteed that you would get pneumonia. The fact that I often went out with damp hair and never caught pneumonia didn’t matter to her.
When I was pregnant, she saw me reach for something on an upper shelf, and shrieked, “You’ve wrapped the cord around the baby’s neck!” If you raise your arms above your head, the umbilical cord wraps itself around the baby’s neck.
How am I supposed to get my shirts off?
My MIL was startled by a dog when she was pregnant with her daughter (my SIL), and sincerely believed that was why her daughter was deathly afraid of dogs. I don’t suppose the fact that she spent the girl’s entire life telling her she was afraid of dogs helped any. :rolleyes:
My husband and I have a dog, and my SIL just loves her.
In the poker or con games world, this is called a tell. To wit, if you anticipate a result, even though you may consciously reject the premise, your unconscious mind will provide the psychomotor impetus to satisfy the presumption. This is why double blind methodology is so critical to any experiment involving human psychology, including pharmaceuitcal testing; even if the subject and observer intend to be competely honest, their expectations will color their behavior with respect to an anicipated result. With dowsing rods, it takes constant tension to keep the wires straight (your hands tend to turn in naturally), so any cue that the location has water combined with the natural inclination to let the wires cross may seem like the wires are pulling together.
A better experiment for dowsing would involve the subject performing dowsing operations without foreknowledge of the location of water and in absence of any observer who may offer cues to the correct location or response. Better yet, build a mechanical device that operates without any human intervention and performs the same action.
I have performed this experiement on a couple of occasions with various persons who “believed” in dowsing; although there were a couple of single spot on predictions, most were off, quite badly, and plotting the results as a statistical distribution demonstrated that the accurate predictions fell entirely within the range of a normal distribution (taking into account the small population size). An experienced dowser can probably gain clues from the terrain as to where water is likely to be located, and so improve the odds of a positive result, but I’ve never seen one who could demonstrate anything like 80% or better confidence. But when they did hit one, it was championed as a success, and failures forgotten.
In lack of any plausible physical mechanism and in light of the failure of this method in objective assessment, I have to call b.s. on the pseudoscience of dowsing.
Stranger
A FEMA inspector in New Orleans was paralyzed from a stray bullet fired into the air for New Year’s “celebrations” by people ignorant of this fact.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who does not believe that the moon appears bigger at the horizon because of refraction from the atmosphere. It’s fun to prove that one to them. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_110.html
No, I’m serious. How do you know they (the laws of physical science) would still operate if not one person had the slightest shred of belief in any of it?
I don’t think you’ve conducted this experiment, therefore I contend you have no right to say that. I’m not saying conclusively that they wouldn’t, but I’m saying you have no right to say conclusively that they would.
The laws of physical science are a description of observed phenomena. If they only operated when at least one person believed in them, how would they ever have been observed in the first place?